Regnery Claims Horowitz Is Being Smeared

Regnery Publishing has put out the following press release, which claims that "A coalition of professors, students, and organizations has launched a smear campaign to discredit David Horowitz’s newly-released book, The Professors."

PRESS RELEASE

Using the misnomer, “Free Exchange on Campus,” the group blatantly distorts the content of The Professors and unscrupulously impugns the Academic Freedom Campaign launched by Horowitz through his organization, Students for Academic Freedom.

Among the spurious charges alleged by the group is that The Professors attacks faculty for their political associations and beliefs, rather than for their political advocacy and indoctrination of students in the classroom.

Notably, the introduction to The Professors addresses this criticism directly and states explicitly that the purpose of the book is not to condemn university faculty for their political views: “This book is not intended as a text about left-wing bias in the university and does not propose that this bias is necessarily a problem. Every individual, whether conservative or liberal, has a perspective and therefore a bias. Professors have every right to interpret the subjects they teach according to their individual points of view. This is the essence of academic freedom.”

“The statement condemning The Professors is a naked attempt by a coalition of leftwing groups including the ACLU, the National Education Association, the pro-Castro United States Students Association and People for the American Way to censor my book before the public has a chance to read it,” commented Horowitz. “The statement is a malicious smear of my book and of the academic freedom campaign. I have not ‘retracted’ any claims about indoctrination in the classroom as the document says.”

Members of the coalition also made statements unfairly linking Horowitz to Andrew Jones who offered UCLA students money in exchange for reporting on their professors, and falsely claimed that Horowitz has retracted allegations of classroom indoctrination.

“In McCarthyite fashion, the ACLU statement accuses me of guilty association with Andrew Jones who is conducting a campaign at UCLA,” stated Horowitz. “I am not associated in any way with Andrew Jones nor is he my ‘protégé’ as the statement claims. Andrew Jones did work for me once but I fired him two years ago and have publicly denounced his campaign as the signers of this malicious statement know but choose to ignore. This is exactly the kind of attempt to suppress dissenting views that exists on our campuses today and that my book exposes.”

David Horowitz is the chairman of Students for Academic Freedom, author of the Academic Bill of Rights, and leader of a national movement to promote intellectual diversity and restore educational values to America’s institutions of higher learning. His most relcent book, The Professors, was released Monday, February 13, by Regnery Publishing.

More Comments:

Mike Schoenberg -
2/19/2006

If those students are being indoctrinated why is it that the country is getting more and more conservative especially during the period that Mr. Horowitz whines about?

John Edward Philips -
2/19/2006

There are so many problems with David Horowitz that one scarcely knows where to begin.

First, like the Communists he used to include himself with, he assumes that classes exist to indoctrinate students, and that students can be indoctrinated. I've seen professors, liberal and conservative alike, try to indoctrinate students. It always backfired. Any professor trying to indoctrinate students is a fool. Any professor who is penalizing students can have his or her grade challenged. Horowitz has come up with no evidence that the system is broken. Why should we "fix" it, especially according to his design?

Moreover, Horowitz is a compulsive liar, and even lies privately, as he did to me in a private e-mail exchange. He is simply not to be trusted. The more he writes, the more he will be exposed. The more he is exposed, the less he will be trusted.

Tim Matthewson -
2/18/2006

Horowitz is a political operative who writes progaganda, not an author who writes books abouts politics. Like other operatives, he understands that the truth or falsity of a claim matters less than the number of times that the claim is repeated and the volume of the repetition.
Horowitz is also a part of the Republican noise machine, as best described by David Brock in The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy and also in Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative.
Regarding point one as defined above, Horowtiz has been caught, on more than one occasion, propounding false claims proven to be untrue. His response has been that he simply does not have enough time to verify the claims of students. So he takes them all as truthful, despite their lack of authentication, thus revealing that he is an sleazy operative, who like most of his ilk, has scant regard for the truth.

Michael Green -
2/18/2006

Horowitz claims that he attacks professors who indoctrinate students. First, he must have sat in all of these classes. Second, there is an enormous difference between expressing a position and penalizing a student for disagreeing with that position. That seems beyond Horowitz's understanding. Usually, those who believe that others are guilty of indoctrination simply do not think they are the only ones guilty of it themselves.